Thursday, November 26, 2009

Please help Food Democracy Now fight Islam Siddiqui’s confirmation to the USDA. His Senate confirmation hearing is set for next week.

About Islam Siddiqui... During his career, Siddiqui spent over 3 years as a pesticide lobbyist, an Undersecretary at the USDA and a VP at CropLife. In defending Siddiqui, the White House has stated that he played a key role in helping establish the country’s first organic standards.6 What they neglect to mention, though, is that those original organic standards would have allowed irradiation, sewage sludge and GMOs to undermine organic integrity! The standards were so watered down that 230,000 people signed a petition for them to be changed, which they eventually were.7

Fortunately, the organic community stopped Siddiqui and his cronies then, and we need your help now to do it again. If Siddiqui’s nomination is allowed to go through, then agribusiness will continue to control the seeds, the science, and the distribution of global food and agriculture.

Saturday, November 14, 2009

I'm one of those people who thinks, "if Thanksgiving dinner isn't amazing, then there's just no point!". So over the years I've roasted a few birds and made enough stuffings & sauces to be able to know a good recipe when I see it. Here I've compiled a list of my favorite recipes & sites for your Thanksgiving enjoyment.

1. Here is the recipe from Fine Cooking I've been making for the past 8 years (It's excellent):A Thanksgiving Feast for Twelve By Michael BrissonThere are a lot of other great recipes on Fine Cooking.com.

2. We all love Jamie Oliver, and these holiday recipes are already making my mouth water:

Thursday, November 12, 2009

At first, when I heard about Typekit I was skeptical. I've practically made a career around being able to "optimize" text for the web. Now I can unlearn all of the technical, CSS rules I've been compelled to follow for over a decade! Now I have more freedom to focus on design! Typekit.com is one of these web based tools which is very simple and very useful for every designer. I just signed up for an account, and got a snippet of code which I can add to my web pages (I added the code to my blogger template).

Typekit works with your HTML & CSS. The service simplifies a coding technique which has already been around for years but probably isn't really accessible to graphic designers (because let's face it, what programmer is ever going to think about more than 4 fonts?). Best of all, it's reasonably priced starting at $25/year for 10GB of bandwidth (which should be plenty). In contrast, Adobe sells an enterprise level solution which is completely too expensive for small design studios.

I'm still trying this out & I'll post examples when I have them. My biggest criticism with typekit so far is that it's easier to try out fonts in CODE than in the design process - which is kind of a time suck if you prefer to vet out a design in Photoshop.

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Following up on my most popular post, here's how you can prevent yourself from even being called for jury duty in the 1st place. Over a year ago I moved from California to the east coast. But my CA driver's license doesn't expire until 2012, and I don't need to renew it. Since I'm planning on moving again I simply don't want to go through the hassle of going to the DMV. I did, however register to vote in my new state so I could vote for Obama. I thought registering to vote would trigger jury duty harassment, but so far I haven't heard from my local court, and I think I'm in the clear.

If you're like me, an independent contractor who never really gets paid for jury time, then you might want to make sure you never get called. So here's the scoop, but you may need to coordinate this with a move. (I'm not sure if you have to move out of state or just to a different locality, probably depends on how modern your state & localities are).

1. A month or more leading up to a move, go renew your driver's license. You'll probably get a new license good for at least several years. You need to do this ahead of your move since the DMV has to mail your new license to your "home" address.

After this your credit profiles will state your new address, and most bureaucracies use your credit report to establish your home address. But your new, local court system does not look through credit data to mine for jury victims.

OPINION: I personally think it's wrong that the court system cannot compensate jurors for their time. This set-up predisposes juries to be made up of mostly affluent people (retirees & housewives) who can afford to serve, and does not make available a true "jury of ones peers". Ironically, it will probably take several major class action lawsuits in different states just to reform this system.

Online surveys a good, but they are over-used as a cheap way to get user feedback. These surveys cannot be accurate simply by the "one size fit's all" type of design they utilize. There's never an opportunity in these multiple choice surveys for users to give details about their unique experience with a business. Why not actually talk to your customers?

What I really want to tell United in this survey which I found in my inbox this morning is... DON'T spam all your customers with a survey disguised as a contest. I would much rather have a guaranteed, small, mileage grant for completing a survey, than have the carrot of 100,000 frequent flier miles dangled in my face. The way I look at this, is there is no actual reason for me to complete this survey for United because there's no guarantee that I'll get anything for my time & thoughts. Not to mention the fact that every other airline conducts their surveys with similar contests. And on top of all of this, "contest websites" are starting to proliferate on the web, it's getting to be contest overload for consumers.

So what about my flight? Well, it was really weird that the "economy plus" section on my flight was nearly empty while plain ole economy was packed. It was also kinda weird that United had to announce to customers not to spread into Economy Plus without first paying for it. Nobody wanted to cough up the extra $50 for 5 more inches. I remember the good old days when if a flight wasn't full, folks were welcome to make themselves more comfortable without being taxed.

Who is IG?

Designer, artist, cultural anthropologist, foodie.
By day, I'm a "User Experience Designer" which is a fancy way of saying I design software interfaces. When not on the clock, I like to experience life and culture. My design portfolio - badly in need of a redesign - is at http://www.studioroom.com.